MEMBER MONDAY

First, a pair of observations are offered to set up our discussion:

Observation One (Thought Experiment, previously shared in MM 12/6/21 Ego Is The Enemy):

It's a pre-dawn morning and you're lying quietly in bed. There's virtually no sensory input, no sound. The mind is clearer in that darkness than it ever is during the day as your thoughts survey your universe in the manner and scope of your choosing.

Then the perspective changes. You are now on the outside looking in and realize that this survey of infinite vastness is nothing more than an illusion produced by three pounds of wetware. Is there any doubt you are, at that point, lord of your skull-sized kingdom? Upon awakening, your kingdom reconnects with the "real" world.

Observation Two:

A recent visit to the homestead of (honorary club member) Bob Davis gave rise to an epiphany of sorts. Behind his farmhouse is an encampment. The encampment consists of a heavy canvas tent, a cot, a complement of cooking elements, an extensive vegetable garden with drying boxes and other intimate connections to the natural world . . . and . . . . and the total absence of ties to so-called modernity (other than, perhaps, the sound of a distant airplane). Many nights, most any season, Bob elects to forgo the traditional comforts of his farmhouse to call this his home -- home, both literally and figuratively…

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Reports of near-death experiences -- the white light, the tunnel, the disembodied observer floating above the crash scene -- serve, to some, the glimpse of life after life. Given the existential implications at stake, the big question becomes what happens to consciousness after "death." One researcher has suggested that "the evidence so far is that it (i.e. consciousness) doesn't die when you and I cross over (to death)." Perhaps the question of an eternal afterlife is at least worthy of a one-hour Member Monday discussion.

That researcher's reference to the word "evidence" opens the subject matter from the exclusive province of metaphysics onto the provisional world of science and medicine, more in our collective grasp.

Enter our focus article The Afterlife Is In Our Heads. We might start with a simple key definition i.e. that of death. Death defined, say, as the point of cardiac arrest where the brain no longer receives blood and oxygen might take us down one path i.e. the near-death experience of a brain in extremis as explained in physiological terms. A different definition of death, say the total cessation of brain activity, would have absolutely nothing to say about any such near-death experience presaging eternity and would place the entire matter squarely into the world of pure faith, the supernatural and the mystics. A free dessert to anyone with a confirmed case…

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I literally lost my identity a few evenings ago on the half-hour bus ride from Denver to Boulder. It went unnoticed until a phone call came the following morning inquiring whether I recognized a certain credit card charge. No, of course not, the card has been with me in my wallet, right here . . . oh, wait. Thus began an odyssey flickering between mild panic and existential pondering.

You might not be aware of the many logistical steps to be undertaken with a missing wallet/purse: lock down/replace any credit/debit cards; implement a credit freeze; obtain a new driver's license; etc. That might sound fairly routine, except for one thing -- your life becomes provisional if you can no longer prove who you are. But for locating my passport, my life would have become a hell on many fronts.

That experience, however, led to an odd sort of reckoning -- I felt strangely free for the moment, untethered by who/what the contents of the wallet represented me to be, a kind of invisibility. There was a palpable lightness as the past had simply become an imagined construct (even the threats that my grade school infractions would go on my "permanent record" now rang hollow). Driving (w/o license) to the DMV was now riding in the desert on a horse with no name 'cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain…

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Putin to western Europe: Who's my Bitch.

By most accounts, Putin's war is not going to his liking. Yet, per our focus article (Fintan O’Toole: Vladimir Putin is losing his insane war on Ukraine, (thanks Mike Maloy)), his Ukrainian gamble is based on a perception of western weakness, that if push came to shove the rest of Europe could not endure an energy shutdown. Is he right? The answer may well test the limits of liberal democracy.

No one needs reminding that Ukraine's survival rests largely on the financial and military support of democratic governments, that Russia by and large controls Europe's energy supply, and that a liberal democracy rests on the support, or at least the tolerance, of its electorate . . . and that winter is looming…

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This will be a follow-on to our earlier MM (9/19/22)/Network State session for a deeper dive into the potential, challenges, and opportunities represented by the so-called Network State, together with how it might fit within the unfolding world order. First priority for the session will be extended to accommodate those unable to attend the earlier session due to our limited capacity.

No special expertise is required for this stand-alone session as it may feature two lead participants who can address some of the more technological elements. Such elements may also be intertwined with the world of blockchain/cryptocurrency, a fascinating subject in its own right.

You may thus find of interest two articles framing the Bitcoin debate, the first making the "pro" case Bitcoin Is Civilization, written by the author of the earlier featured Network State (Balaji Srinivasan) and the "against" case The Case Against Bitcoin, written by Michael Green…

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A man named Balaji Srinivasan has served up an extraordinary vision. He addresses the ways in which technology will further upend a world in which the very meaning of community has been primarily defined in terms of physical proximity. Even now, perhaps a cloud buddy eight thousand miles away is closer to you than your next door neighbor.

Now extend and extrapolate. The implications are enormous, including the potential reordering of the familiar nation state into overlapping or even autonomous network states -- highly aligned online communities with a capacity for collective action, even political power.

The challenge comes in breaking down this ambitious macro-topic into bite-sized iterative segments. Mr. Srinivasan has done so. His vision is both compelling and free (google Network State for his entire book). The only investment by you is a bit of your time, attention, and some imagination.

The focus interview (02-33-34.webloc) truly sparkles but is long. Be sure to at least watch/read the thirty-minute essence (starting at minute 114:45 of the video and/or page 39 of the transcript linked therein, though the rest of the material provides context and is quite interesting in its own right). The session will consist of our shared epiphanies…

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The irony is exquisite -- tech billionaires buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive some societal collapse that they themselves helped to cause (Super-Rich Preppers). If this serves as a glimpse of some Spenglerian end-game, perhaps it's time once again to discuss governance.

The Onion some years back featured a delicious satirical piece citing the engagement by the American people of a high-powered lobbyist to further the peoples' interests. After all, if the likes of Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, and Monsanto can purchase an inside voice in the Beltway, perhaps it's high time for the people to have their own seat at the table (The People Hire A High-Powered Lobbyist). Or, as they say, if you're not at the table you're on the menu.

Too cynical? Per Oscar Wilde's definition of a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, to whom do we look these days to be singularly focused on those values, like community, we profess to hold dear as a nation? As such, the defining issue of this peoples' lobby would be "Virtue Politics" i.e. the key to a healthy regime lies in bringing to power those who are good and wise…

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Member Monday is all about opening new vistas. And so it is here with the subject of calligraphy, especially as it’s applied to those like this cursive-challenged student whose third grade handwriting sample smacked of a squashed spider and whose later on-line graphology test pegged him as uneven, stingy, inner-contradicted, wrapped in distrust with flourishes of mythomania -- with probably a bad haircut, to boot.

We welcome new club member Amanda Nicole (Borne), calligrapher and hand lettering artist, to be our lead participant as we discuss the healing power offered by modern calligraphy (Healing Power Of Modern Calligraphy). Be not afraid. The goal of the session is simple awareness, rather than a lesson on penmanship from Professor Eat-Your-Peas. “It’s not about the bike”; it’s not about the calligraphy.

It’s really all about broadening a mindset that embraces a certain kind of deepened intimacy, to others, to oneself. Maybe start by comparing the impact of a handwritten thank-you note to a flat, perfunctory email. It’s night and day. Yes, one might say, but the email is more efficient, bringing to mind a previously-discussed sentiment i.e. in a perfectly efficient society, man is redundant…

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The discussion topic is a postcard from the edge. Tell me more. The subject is psychotherapy. Tell me more. The featured article is about lessons learned by a late-term resident in a psychiatric hospital (Adventures Of Psychotherapy Resident), such as:

"Nobody likes an awkward silence. If a patient tells you something, and you are silent, then the patient will rush to fill the silence, probably with whatever they were holding back the first time they started talking. You won’t believe how well this works until you try it. Just stay silent long enough, and the other person will tell you everything."

Our session will be about how you – maybe therapist, patient, friend of patient, couple's counselor, student, or simply a curious participant -- react to the priceless revelations in this piece. If you don't laugh out loud, your dessert is on-the-house…

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Animals are usually perfectly themselves, not the elaborately perverse psychological mysteries that people sometimes become. The genuineness ascribed to animals may apply equally to those who would protect them.

Enter the Gorilla Rehabilitation and Conservation Education (GRACE) Center and its general mission to promote the conservation of wild gorillas and their Congolese habitat. Our very own Tommi Wolfe, the director of GRACE, will be our lead participant as she outlines and we discuss what’s involved in the care and rehabilitation of the wild Grauer gorillas having been rescued from wildlife trafficking and poaching (GRACE).

As you are introduced to the rescue of Lulingu (Saving Lulingu), for example, keep in mind this species shares some 98% of its genetic code with humans. Anyone not moved by this clip must have a heart of stone that no facts and figures can penetrate…

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Think of your life in terms of performance art, the stage set from your earliest days. You don't see it as a game but it is. The rules of the game are defined from beyond -- your schooling, your religion, your profession. You fixate on the future. Oh, what a good boy am I, or will be.

And then, perhaps, comes the day when you realize no one is really watching your performance, judging you. This notion, far from dispiriting (nothing personal, those audience members are simply preoccupied with their own worlds), is actually liberating. It's the day you can finally, perhaps, claim your own agency, the day you can become more present, the day you can stop performing.

This proposition plays out in our discussion pieces, starting with a six-minute segment by the late English, self-styled “philosophical entertainer” Alan Watts (Alan Watts/Playing The Game of Life), and as further rounded out by David Brooks in a recent Opinion Piece (NYT: Is Life a Story or a Game?). Life is a series of games, you see, all played in the pursuit of what is truly sought -- the insatiable quest for status.

In so doing, Brooks builds on his previous thesis that one’s life can be thought of in terms of two mountains: the first, an ego-based pursuit of worldly success reflected one’s resume; the second, an ego-lessened focus better captured in one’s eulogy (as we discussed in our MM10/7/19) Second Mountain session)….

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We could barely wrap our heads around the pandemic two years ago. The virus, fresh out of the bottle, simply didn't belong to these post-industrial times, not here, not now. There was a kind of stunned incomprehension as if a cannibal had joined the family picnic and calmly started eating the children.

We engaged with this uninvited guest through a series of MM sessions centered around imagining what a post-pandemic world might look like. The overarching question was how the world might be shaped, not only by the pandemic itself but, more so, by the manner in which we chose to respond.

The answer back then was inconclusive, too many unknowns. A somewhat clearer picture may now be emerging with more data points and a somewhat greater familiarity. A hint of this comes from a keyword in the title to this week’s discussion piece (NYT: Endemic Covid-19 Looks Pretty Brutal). That key word would be "endemic," connoting some sort of an established baseline, even if it be of an unknown duration.

Of course, the word "brutal," also in the title, gets our attention. Yes, this bug still has ambitions: the domestic infection rate year-to-date already represents half of all infections since inception. Another estimate calls for five percent of the country to become infected each month…

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The country’s Treasury Secretary reportedly expressed her surprise at the inflation number. Consider. The purported job of this one-time Fed Chair was to monitor the integrity of the nation's monetary system.

She, with her stable of 400 Phd economists – steeped in such esoteric language as measuring the velocity of the ding-dong times the second derivative of the dooh-dah – was somehow taken aback by what a bright Fourth Grader could grasp i.e. the more money you print the less value each unit would have.

Yes, print. Cut to the current Chair of the Central Bank (Fed) and spend literally thirty seconds to see through years of obfuscating terms like quantitative easing for a peek at a fundamental truth (Jerome Powell - we print money - 60 minutes interview). The current inflation story may indeed be quite serious but perhaps really not all that complicated. The Beginner’s Mind might behold it in terms of simply market place distortion.

After all, inflation showed up long before we could even spell CPI. It started in the form of asset-price inflation. The soaring nominal price of things like stocks, bonds, and real estate largely reflected the unnatural growth in money supply. Together with the artificial suppression of interest rates, the so-called asset bubble exploded, serving to enrich a certain subset of the population, i.e. the asset owners. It added little to real economic growth…

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A farmer got so old that he couldn't work the fields anymore. So he would spend the day just sitting on the porch. His son, still working the farm, would look up from time to time and see his father sitting there.

“He's of no use any more," the son thought to himself, "he doesn't do anything!" One day the son got so frustrated by this, that he built a wooden coffin, dragged it over to the porch, and told his father to get in. Without saying anything, the father climbed inside.

After closing the lid, the son dragged the coffin to the edge of the farm where there was a high cliff. As he approached the drop, he heard a light tapping on the lid from inside the coffin. He opened it up. Still lying there peacefully, the father looked up at his son. "I know you are going to throw me over the cliff, but before you do, may I suggest something?"

"What is it?" replied the son. "Throw me over the cliff, if you like," said the father, "but save this good wooden coffin. Your children might need to use it."

Zen Buddhist (Wooden Coffin) story.

People fall into two groups: the already-old and/or the future-old. No exceptions other than, perhaps, Paul McCartney (age 80!), though even he reportedly reassured an intimidated fan by saying, yeah, “I’ve really done very well but, believe me, I’m just some geezer.”

Perhaps you’ve indulged in a comparative then/now picture of a fantasy character from your youth. Oh, my God, you think, not only is the bloom off the rose but that fantasy is now almost unrecognizable, perhaps even distorted by the botched plastic surgery undertaken in pursuit of some imagined previous essence. That essence of youth may run the gamut from sexual allure, to intellect, to power, to wealth, to athleticism (MM 2/5/18 Glory Days). All in vain, though, as each disappears to be swallowed up to join the ranks of “the Other.”

So here’s the puzzle raised in our focus discussion piece: why do we neglect and disdain the one vulnerable group we all eventually will join (Old Not Other)? Our answers may reveal more about us than we realize…

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"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

There's that word -- indivisible -- the one we as elementary school children invariably stumbled over as we pledged our allegiance to the Republic every single morning at the start of the school day. We continue to stumble over that word today, though not in terms of its awkward pronunciation but in terms of its meaning.

That's because our nation was established as a confederation of individual states, in that sense divisible, bound together as a constitutional republic. The respective interests, rights, and powers of those separate states versus those of the binding central government were established under the Constitution in an arrangement called federalism, subject to interpretation.

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Long before the monthly book group morphed into today's weekly Member Monday we discussed (in 2006!) Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning. Powerful stuff, that was, diving into Frankl's WWII concentration camp experience with its unimaginable privation, total dehumanization, and no expectation of the next heartbeat only to -- surprise! -- soar from this existential underbelly to the very expression of life itself.

Frankl not only emerged, but flourished, to become M.D, Phd., world-renowned neurologist and psychiatrist, author of thirty books and world-wide speaker with another 29 honorary degrees. What was this enabling life source? Frankl credits the philosophy he founded -- Logotherapy -- which includes, among its tenets, the assertion that our main motivation for living is the will to find meaning in life.

Given that our weekly sessions are designed more for bite-sized backgrounders (rather than full books), the link above will take you to the three-page Wikipedia summary of Frankl's work. Accompanying that will be a movie.

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“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Make the inferred hangman in Samuel Johnson quote a terminal diagnosis and the mind in question that of a neuroscientist and it might just present the ultimate in existential thinking (A Neuroscientist Prepares For Death).

The writer has “heart cancer”, a rare sarcoma that has caused no symptoms but gives him only 6-12 months of remaining life. His initial reaction was, indeed, quite human, “I was so mad, I could barely see,” he says of the diagnosis.

Only then does he apply his “inner-nerd” neuroscientific curiosity to investigate what the contemplation of death might reveal about the workings of the human mind. He begins his introspection with an attempted reconciliation of two seemingly contradictory mental states – fury at that which has befallen him; gratitude for having had a wonderful life – as he confronts the ultimate test of a first-rate intelligence, per F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum, to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

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The blog site BigLawSucks once provided a window into the soul-crushing world of the big-city law firms. The anonymity of the site invited rather vivid accounts by both associates and junior partners of lives being sucked dry not only by the killer hours but by the cumulative emotional, physical, and mental stresses. One could at times even follow and chronicle certain individuals as they struggled to keep up with the incessant demands until – poof! – they disappeared. Burnout.

Perhaps burnout is better seen as a metaphor than a medical diagnosis i.e. an exhaustion, a loss of self, so deep that it bumps against one's capacity -- intellectual, experience, and willpower -- to function. It also differs from mere stress in that stress generally connotes something more acute, more transitory, to which some may actually be addicted, even regarded as a mark of distinction, a sort of modern-day Descarte: "I’m stressed; therefore I am."

My own attraction to the BigLawSucks site arose, not out of some sort of schadenfreude, but because the sense of psychological wiring on fire became evident in my own years as in-house counsel for a multinational corporation undergoing a major and complicated Chapter 11 "Reorganization." In that exercise, a reorganization involving a multinational and its dozen foreign subsidiaries, the sun became the enemy as it shone perpetually somewhere, and so did the issues. The feeling was that of a zombie.

Quit whining.

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Two men were walking down the street when one, having spotted in the distance a newly-minted billionaire, said to the other, “You know, we have something he’ll never have” . . . . “What’s that?” asked the other . . . . “Enough.”

The Vanderbilt story is a slight twist on the quintessential inter-generational rags-to-riches-to-rags dynastic plot line: first-generation founder, a visionary, ruthless perhaps, forges financial empire out of nothing but cunning, luck and single-minded passion; energy dissipates as heirs shift focus from offense to defense marked by the consolidation of riches and self-indulgent excess; fortune eventually exhausts itself among the squabbling trust-funders of the unfolding lineage.

Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt built an empire front-running the railroad promise of 1800s America. He and his son William left a legacy that would make the Sun God blink, an amount said at the time to be in excess of all the money in the U.S. Treasury. That fortune, becoming largely depleted by wretched excess, was left to grandson Reggie on his 21st birthday who expressed his gratitude by devoting his life to “brandy and gambling”, thereby blowing much of the remaining riches and dying by choking in a pool of blood from the consequences of an enlarged liver at age 45 (The Rich And The Wealthy).

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From dark, medieval Prague, Kafka imagined his Amerika where everyone there always, invariably, was smiling.

The underbelly of that imagination is offered up in our discussion piece as it critiques society's enforced bias towards positivity (The Art Of Negativity). Resist the temptation to write off the observations as simply the reflex of Gloomy Gus or Debbie Downer. You may see here a kind of toxic positivity that has inculcated so much of our contemporary everyday interactions.

At its heart is the notion of responsible negative thinking in the sense of it being the seed of the critical thinking that we all need as we face life's inevitable difficulties, uncertainties, and setbacks. The label of negative, rather than connoting some destructive mentality, is better seen as part of the process to work things through.

Seeing it in that context reveals the comparative shallowness of the trite affirmations we often see and hear today e.g. some decades ago, having been diagnosed with a world-class though non-terminal illness, I was invited to just look at the bright side knowing that it probably wouldn't kill me. Have a nice day.

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